Thomas P. Flynn '57 – A Life of Service Capped by a Gift for Future Generations

Growing up in Manchester, the only child of a French-Canadian mother and an Irish father, Tom Flynn developed early on a great love of languages, French culture and history. In high school he played football, sang in the choir, and was elected President of his senior class. At Saint Anselm, he served in student government and the economics society, and graduated with high honors with the Class of 1957.

Tom worked first for Goldman Sachs on Wall Street, and later for Montgomery Securities in San Francisco, rising to leadership positions with both firms. He was elected to the Saint Anselm College board of trustees in 1979 and served with distinction for eighteen years. In 1997 he was elected as one of the college's few emeritus trustees, a position he held until his death in November 2019 at age eighty-four.

For many years, Tom had had a simple bequest in his will for the college. Early in 2019, as he began to struggle with his final illness, he and his wife, Sherri, thought more deeply about his legacy on the Hilltop, and how to recognize and put into practice the values he learned here while he was still able to see them in action. They thus established and funded the Thomas P. Flynn, Class of 1957, Endowed Scholarship Fund for History. Generations of students of history at Saint Anselm will benefit from Tom's core values in action.